Tuesday, May 02, 2017

Still Incoherent After All These Years (cont.)...

In the wake of a recent report on how the UK government had just arrested three more Muslim women in a terror raid, Robert Spencer just the other day wrote with robustly no-nonsense determination:

The British authorities recently admitted that they’re making daily
jihad terror arrests. Daily. This should show any sane person that their
approach to this problem has been drastically wrong.

This, from a Counter-Jihad Mainstream analyst who nearly ten years ago solemnly averred on Jihad Watch:

I am not "anti-Islam."

And then in the same editorial proceeded to aver with equal seriousness, albeit with slightly different (and slightly tortured) wording, that he is not anti-Muslim, either. Here's the extended quote which clearly reveals this stance:

It is not an act of hatred against Muslims to point out the
depredations of jihad ideology....Am I "anti-Muslim"? Some time ago here
at Jihad Watch I had an exchange with an English convert to Islam. I said: "I would like nothing better than a flowering, a renaissance,
in the Muslim world, including full equality of rights for women and
non-Muslims in Islamic societies: freedom of conscience, equality in
laws regarding legal testimony, equal employment opportunities, etc." Is
all that "anti-Muslim"? My correspondent thought so. He responded: "So,
you would like to see us ditch much of our religion and, thereby,
become non-Muslims."

In other words, he saw a call for equality of rights for women and
non-Muslims in Islamic societies, including freedom of conscience,
equality in laws regarding legal testimony, and equal employment
opportunities, as a challenge to his religion. To the extent that they
are, these facts have to be confronted by both Muslims and non-Muslims.
But I make no apologies: it is not "anti-Muslim" to wish freedom of
conscience and equality of rights on the Islamic world -- quite the
contrary.

(And notice how Spencer, for good measure, shows by his first sentence there that he buys into the specious PC MC logic, that to be anti-Muslim is to "hate" them.)

And to add insult to injury, Spencer in subsequent months back then, in various Jihad Watch comments threads, gave various Jihad Watch readers grief and stonewalled them with sophistry for their sincere, mature and intelligent probing of this most curious stance of his. Extended transcripts I published years ago document this, here and here.

Spencer has never contradicted this in subsequent years --
by, for example, officially publishing the words: "What the hell was I
thinking!!!? Of course I'm anti-Islam and anti-Muslim! [FACEPALM] My deepest apologies for the
confusion all these years, dear readers...!!!" (from the Don't Hold Your Breath Department...).

Nor, naturally, have any of his adoring fans (other than those brave souls of yesteryear, documented in the above-mentioned links) bothered
to call him on the carpet for this egregiously soft, not to mention
incoherent, stance of his.

Further Reading:

This Google page of many more instances of me over the years expending my time and labor banging my head against the wall whilst re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.